Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist

[Mark H. David]

Hi, sorry for late response, but regarding other character sets *besides* Unicode with Hebrew characters that ended up in Alphabetic Presentation Forms, several were from Apple: Mac OS Hebrew. See this mapping table:

http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/HEBREW.TXT

----- Original message -----
From: Abraham Gross via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
To: unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist
Date: Tuesday, June 02, 2020 8:18 PM

Why are there precomposed Hebrew characters in Unicode (Alphabetic Presentation Forms block)?

It says in the FAQ that “a substantial number of presentation forms were encoded in Unicode as compatibility characters, because legacy software or data included them.” (https://www.unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#PForms)

I can't find any character set other than Unicode that has separate codepoints for all Hebrew letters with a dagesh/mapiq or any of the other precomposed letters other than the Yiddish ligatures. (ex: Code page 862, ISO/IEC 8859-8, Windows-1255)

Does anyone know where I can find the legacy software or character sets that had these presentation forms?

I also want to see the documents/proposals that got these characters accepted as part of Unicode. Does anyone know where I can find them? The closest I got was when I figured out the proposal to add HEBREW LETTER YOD WITH HIRIQ is in proposal N1364, but I can't find it in the document register…
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